The new term at DDH starts with two weeks of many highlights. First there was the conference, entitled “Medieval Manuscripts as Truly Open Data”, given by Dr Will Noel, Director of th Center and Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He spoke about the manuscripts in a digital age and what would be the best practice to make them truly open access. He presented for instance the collection of Manuscripts of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, which is accessible on flickr (Walters Art Museum Illuminated Manuscripts).
Walters Art Museum W.73, fol. 1v (rota of Winds)
Today Dr Elena Pierazzo from the DDH spoke about “Unpacking the draft page: time, space and gamification of digital scholarly editions”. She presented her research-project on Proust draft’s (Proust’s Notebook 46). The whole manuscript is available on the web site of the BNF (Fonds Marcel Proust). In her presentation she also mentioned a project on Nietzsche’s manuscripts (Nietzsche Source). Two important ideas emerged from her talk: 1) the modern manuscripts are to be distinguished from the medieval ones, as their become private documents showing the working process of the author. 2) in such manuscripts a writing sequence should be distinguished from a reading sequence.
Finally there will be a third conference given by Prof. Christopher Blackwell from the Furman University who is working at the Homer Multitext from the CHS in Washington. Under the title “21st Century Citation and Practical Quotation in a Digital Library” he will be presenting new thoughts about the way citations/quotations should look like in a digital library.
Travelling with Demetrios of Skepsis 